The Turkish author Orhan Pamuk has reportedly left his home country to live in America amid fears for his life. The Nobel laureate is believed to be at risk of assassination in Turkey following the murder of Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink last month. Threats appeared to have been made against Pamuk by the man who confessed to orchestrating the murder.

Leader: Naguib Mahfouz, the great Egyptian novelist who died yesterday, would in all likelihood have been largely unread outside his own country and language had it not been for a single act: the 1988 decision by the Swedish Academy to award the Nobel prize in literature to the author of Children of Gebelawi.